The latest from French/Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb takes the same three Algerian brothers featured in his sweeping WW2 yarn “Days of Glory” and plops them down in post-war France, where they become urban terrorists on behalf of their homeland’s independence movement.

The oldest, Messaoud (Roschdy Zem), is a former French soldier who returns from the Indochina debacle missing an eye. He hopes to marry, settle down and never again raise a weapon.

Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila), the intellectual, has spent years in a jail for his opposition to French colonialism. He’s a particularly dangerous sort — an doctrinaire revolutionary (think Robespierre) who loves ideology but apparently has little use for people. He doesn’t think twice about ordering the murders of those who disagree with him politically — even family members.

Baby brother Said (Jamel Debbouze) is apolitical. He gets involved in the Parisian crime scene, runs a nightclub and wants only to be left alone to make money.

“Of Gods and Men” is one of the year’s finest films. This French release, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes last year, centers on the monks of the Tibehirine Monastery in Algeria’s Atlas Mountains, who in 1996 were abducted by Islamic revolutionaries then waging war against the government.

Several months later the monks’ severed heads were returned to the monastery for burial.

Happily, this isn’t a film about dying. Rather, Xavier Beauvois has made a movie about living. (more…)